Understanding the National Digital Twin programme

Anglian Water is an early adopter of digital twins within the water sector, working closely with the Centre for Digital Built Britain to help develop the market and showcase how digital twins can support an organisation’s strategic outcomes. Anglian Water has a 15 year vision to develop a digital twin to sit alongside its physical assets. From an Anglian Water perspective, the Digital Twin is essentially an accurate digital representation of their physical assets, enabling insight, supporting decision making and leading to better outcomes. Aligning the digital twin objectives to Anglian Water’s regulated outcomes, as defined by the regulator OFWAT, has been a key step in developing the business case. With the initial vision and roadmap outlined the next step on the roadmap was to implement a proof of concept, to explore the value created from digital twins. Anglian Water undertook a discovery phase and a Proof of Concept with Black and Veatch for a Digital Twin back in 2019, and started to define how a Digital Twin would benefit the delivery and management of physical assets. The discovery phase looked to understand the current landscape, further enhancing the vision and roadmap, and establish persona requirements. It proved vital to really understand the organisation and the impact on people during this early exploratory work. The proof of concept looked at delivering three main outputs, focused on a pumping station to keep the scope focused and value measurable: To demonstrate an asset intelligence capability To demonstrate a visualisation capability To examine the asset data and architecture. Alongside the proof of concept other initiatives were kick started to consider how other elements of digital twin might add value, with a focus on more enhanced use of hydraulic models to explore how water networks could be further optimised. Anglian Water recognised early on that by integrating and enhancing many of the existing enterprise systems, existing investments could be leveraged and technology gaps identified. Learning from the proof of concept and other early works Anglian Water looked to the next step of the roadmap, a scaled demonstrator on the Strategic Pipeline Alliance. The Strategic Pipeline Alliance was set up to deliver up to 500km of large scale pipeline, and alongside this to start defining and delivering the first phase of the digital twin. SPA has a 2025 vision is to deliver a large-scale, holistically linked water transfer resilience system. This will be operated, performance managed and maintained using advanced digital technology. The SPA team set about developing a digital twin strategy which is based on the wider corporate vision and enhances the proof of concept work. The basic premise of the SPA digital twin is to integrate traditionally siloed business functions and systems, to deliver enhanced capability across the asset lifecycle. As with Anglian Water the SPA strategy is focused on using the technology available and developing a robust enterprise, integration, and data architecture to create a foundation for digital twin. Taking this a step further it was decided to adopt a product based approach, thinking about the development of digital twin products aligned to physical assets, that could be re-used across the wider Anglian Water enterprise. This whole life product based approach threw up some interesting challenges, namely how to build a business case that delivered benefit to SPA and also enabled Anglian Water’s future ambitions, taking a lifecycle view of the value delivered. To achieve this meant considering and assessing the value to both SPA during the capital delivery phase and Anglian Water during the operational phases. This process also highlighted that certain elements of the digital twin deliver value to both SPA and Anglian Water equally and could therefore be considered as a shared benefit. The resulting benefits register helped to identify the value delivered to the alliance partners which was vital to securing the delivery board sign off. As Anglian Water are a partner in the alliance, the ability to demonstrate value in the operational phase with SPA developing the technical foundation, was another key element in securing the investment. As part of the overall process the SPA board were keen to see how the investment would be allocated, therefore the strategy evolved to incorporate the capabilities to be developed within SPA to enable digital twin. This helped to inform and validate the team for digital twin delivery. With the capabilities and organisational chart resolved, a governance framework was put into place to allow the digital twin evolution to be managed effectively, putting in place the right checks and balances. This has included input and oversight from the wider Anglian Water team as ultimately, they will be responsible for managing the various digital twins long term. To validate the digital twin against the SPA outcomes and objectives, the various elements of the digital twin were incorporated into the overall enterprise architecture. This has proved to be an important part of the process to ensure alignment to the wider capabilities and importantly ensure the right technology is in place. The enterprise architecture continues to evolve to include information objects below the application layer, again building on the product based approach, so that the enterprise architecture can be utilised in the wider Anglian Water Alliances. In total the development of the strategy, business case and capabilities has taken 6 months, however it is important to note that this builds on the earlier proof of concept and ideation during the initial mobilisation of SPA. Given the approach a key next step is to work with Anglian Water to explore accelerated deployment of SPA digital twins on other major schemes, to put to test the product approach and maximise the investment made. We have learnt from the early developments on SPA that articulating a whole life view of value is vital and that focusing on capital / operational stages is equally important, so that appropriate budget holders can see the value being delivered. We have also learnt the importance of having a bold vision which must be matched by clear definition of the first few steps, showing a long term roadmap for achieving an enterprise digital twin. What is certainly clear is that we still have a lot to learn, however by following good architectural best practice and placing people and our environment at the heart of digital twin, we have put in place a good foundation from which to build. If you would like to know more, please get in touch through the DT Hub.

The Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo) project from the National Digital Twin programme is holding a webinar to launch the project to a global audience in conjunction with the COP26 climate conference on 2nd November at 10:30-12. This webinar replaces the weekly Gemini Call, and the DT Hub community are encouraged to sign up, as well as inviting their wider networks to attend. The climate emergency is here now, and connected digital twins are an important part of achieving net zero and climate resilience. The CReDo team will present how the project meets this urgent need, and will premiere two exciting outputs – a short film and an interactive visualisation of how connected data across three infrastructure networks can provide better insights and lead to better resilience of the system-of-systems overall. Only if we come together to securely share data across sectors can we plan a smarter, greener, more resilient built environment. Book your spot today! Keep an eye on the DT Hub website for updates about the CReDo programme.

About the event Creating the products that will lead the delivery of true net zero will require transformational change in the product engineering, assurance, and production process. Innovative integration across the entire product, service and infrastructure enterprise will be essential to deliver the ambitious levels of performance that customers, society, and the environmental imperative demand. Digitalisation offers an opportunity to unlock transformation of our industrial system and is a core enabler to ensuring that the UK plays a dominant role in the definition of future mobility solutions. Novel information and data management systems will facilitate the ability to integrate the product & service enterprise across the entire value chain - essential if technology is to be exploited effectively. Digitalisation offers the potential to “democratise excellence” across the entire supply base and across our broad national industrial footprint. In this session, led by experts from the Institute of Digital Engineering, we look at one of today’s top technology trends, Digital Twins, and how it’s changing the way businesses operate, the customer experience, and its contribution to cleaner, more efficient, and safer products and services. But what is exactly is a digital twin and how can it add value? Is this the key to sustainability and future economic success, or is it just the new toy on the market? Speakers for this event include: Mark Enzer OBE, Head of National Digital Twin programme (CDBB), Chief Technical Officer at Mott MacDonald Jose Garcia-Urruchi, Head of Digital Engineering Capability - Jaguar Land Rover Peter Van Manen, Principal Consultant - Frazer-Nash Consultancy Louise Krug, Technical Lead – BT Bradley Yorke-Biggs, CEO & Professor of Practice – Institute of Digital Engineering IDE UK Register for this free webinar at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/road-to-cop26-digitalisation-tickets-168562441801

Creating Digital Twins can be like sailing in uncharted waters, so how do you handle it when unforeseen challenges rock the boat? Can you even predict what kinds of things will disrupt your journey? We’ve noticed in various conversations on the DT Hub that no matter what sort of Digital Twin you’re trying to set up or why, there is an incredibly wide range of potential disruptions. From technical to cultural, from resources to supply chains, almost every avenue is susceptible to producing a challenge somewhere. Many examples that we’ve already seen have only become apparent once the people developing Digital Twins are up against them in real time, so that’s why the DT Hub has launched this new activity, Defining Our Digital Twin Challenges! We would like to know about the challenges you’ve encountered on your DT journey in order to make the overall roadmap easier to follow. The information you provide will help us to ultimately define our common challenges so we can start to solve them together. This series of thematic workshops, run by the DT Hub, will progress the conversation around the Digital Twin Journey, and surface some of the challenges that organisations are still facing whilst embarking on their journey. Each Challenge will culminate in an Activity, where we will present the specific challenge areas that you have brought to us to a select group in order to provide constructive feedback. The outcome of these workshops will be to share insights from inside and outside the community for the benefit of the community as a whole. You can use this activity Bring out your Digital Twin Challenges to explore your challenges with others, and our crowd facilitator, Joao, will be interacting with you to make sure you get the best experience possible. Joao is a former market researcher, court interpreter and has been a brilliant member of our team for years as a 100%Open Associate. We look forward to your invaluable contributions, and in turn the exponential development of the DT journey.

The building stock is a city’s most significant socio-cultural and economic resource and its largest capital asset. Buildings are also where we spend most of our lives and most of our money, and where enormous potential for energy and waste reduction lies. To help improve the quality, sustainability and resilience of building stocks, and to help reduce emissions from them, comprehensive information on their composition, operation and dynamic behaviour are required. However in many countries relevant data are extremely difficult to obtain, often highly fragmented, restricted, missing or only available in aggregated form. Colouring Cities sets out to address this issue. The initiative develops open code to facilitate the construction and management of low cost public databases, which double as knowledge exchange platforms, providing open data on buildings, at building level. These are provided to answer questions such as: How many buildings do we have? Which building types, uses, construction systems, ages, styles and sizes are located where? How repairable, adaptable and extendable are they? How long can they last if properly maintained? How energy efficient are they? Can they easily be retrofitted? Who built them and what is their ownership type, and how well do local communities think they work? Colouring Cities also looks to advance a more efficient, whole-of-society approach to knowledge sharing on buildings and cities, allowing for permanent databases to be collaboratively maintained and enriched, year-on-year, by citizens, academia, government, industry and the voluntary sector. Colouring London https://colouringlondon.org/, our live prototype, has been built and tested over the past five years using a step-by-step collaborative approach which has involved consultation with academia, government, industry, the voluntary sector and the community (working across science, the humanities and the arts). It looks to test four approaches to data provision-collation of existing open uploads, computational generation, local crowdsourcing and live streaming. In 2020 the Colouring Cities Research Programme was set up at The Alan Turing Institute to support international research institutions wishing to reproduce and co-work on Colouring Cities code at city or country level. We are currently collaborating with academic partners in Lebanon, Bahrain, Australia, Germany and Greece and Switzerland. Watch the Hub Insight to learn more about the project and the opportunity to get involved. If you'd like to get involved please do test our site and add any recommendations for features you would like in our discussion thread https://discuss.colouring.london/. Or, if you are a public body or DTHub industry member wishing to increase open access to your infrastructure datasets, and/or to digital twin visualisations, relating to the building stock, please contact Polly Hudson at Turing. Find out more:

Delivering the UK National Digital Twin programme - progress and what next? by @Simon Evans, Digital Energy Leader, Arup and Chair of the Gemini Call, National Digital Twin Programme. Book tickets here: Achieving Asset Availability: Reliability, Maintainability, and Supportability | Live Online | SEM7336 (imeche.org)

The DT Hub is proud to be the host of the Cyber-Physical Fabric Summit on 19 July 2021. 10:00 – 16:00 This online summit will explore the power of federated digital twins and cyber-physical infrastructure at a national scale, and is supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering, BEIS, UKRI, GoScience, Alan Turing Institute, Centre for Digital Built Britain and Robotics Growth Partnership. This summit will pull together stakeholders across these infrastructure landscapes. It will explore a bold, expansive vision for a cyber-physical fabric at a national scale to power prosperity and take time, cost and risk out of many vertical initiatives and moonshots. This new horizontal infrastructure would stitch together our physical and digital worlds, weaving together threads such as data, AI, synthetic environments, connected digital twins, living labs, connected smart machines and social science. It could be as transformative as the world wide web and, like the web, would be owned by nobody but used by everybody. The objective is to connect these stakeholders and hopefully foster greater understanding and alignment. If you would like to attend, please register here: Please feel free to share this event with anyone else you feel might be interested in this event.